Playstation VR is proof that we're living in a simulation

It sounds like a thought experiment, the kind you’ve encountered many times before: what if we’re living in a simulation? Yet this is the question now being asked seriously by Tesla's CEO Elon Musk, one of the foremost engineering and business minds of the age. And having tried Playstation VR, Sony’s newly-released virtual reality gaming suite – the most user-friendly, cost-efficient on the market – I can see where he’s coming from. Let me explain.

Musk’s argument runs as follows. Think how far computer games have come in the past 40-something years. They developed from simple confections such as Pong to more complicated 2D platformers, before rapidly embracing the third dimension, photoreal graphics and, now, virtual reality. Imagine, then, how sophisticated – how utterly immersive – such simulations will be in 10,000 years time. That’s a mere blip in the grand sweep of human evolution, but in technological terms the progress would be extraordinary. On that basis, is it not likely that in the future we will not only be able to simulate reality with total verisimilitude but also simulate consciousnesses within that reality? And if that results in the creation of many more digital minds than there are biological ones – plus further simulations nested within the original – what are the odds that we are part of the tiny minority existing in base reality as opposed to an "ancestor simulation"? Well, Musk has an answer: “There’s a billion to one chance.”

If that sounds fanciful then put on a PS VR helmet, because it shows just how easily, even with current technology, the brain can be tricked. At the opening of the game Batman: Arkham VR, for instance, you look down off a ledge and feel vertigo. In Until Dawn: Rush Of Blood, such is your sense of being present in its house of horrors that you experience true terror. Spend even a few minutes on the spaceship dogfighter EVE: Valkyrie and it transports your imagination into its intergalactic universe so totally that when you finally remove the helmet it is, for the briefest moment, a surprise that you’re actually in a room in central London.

Part of the reason that PS VR games are visceral is that interacting with these virtual realms is intuitive. The player grips two stick-shaped controllers, each with a trigger, that are motion tracked by a front-facing camera. These might be represented in the game as hands, say, with a level of spatial accuracy that allows you to pick up virtual objects as if they’re right there in front of you. The VR helmet is light, comfortable and, although it lets in a little light around the nose, you almost forget you’re wearing it – just as your brain eventually stops noticing the slight lack of resolution in its internal 3D display.

And let's be clear: this is the worst that this technology is ever going to be.

So try it – you must – because the emergence of decent VR is an innovation milestone, and it will surely transform much beyond gaming. But steel yourself for an existential crisis.